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// Lay all your LLLL on T 
// Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot 
// by Equimorto 
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It was almost visible there, a faint purple glow in the air around her. And she definitely felt it, it made hairs on her coat stand and her bones itch. It was the most intense she'd ever seen it be, and definitely much, much, much more intense than what was considered safe. If it had been up to Twilight, or really to anyone else, they'd have told her to stop hundreds of metres before. That was why she didn't tell them.
It was a very stupid thing to do, and she fully realised and acknowledged it. But someone had to go there. Oh, they would spend hours and hours discussing what to do, no one willing to put someone else in danger, no one willing to let another go in their stead. And however it ended up going, one of them at least would have to go, and they'd get hurt. So it was for the better if she went instead. She was tougher than all of them, anyway.
Sending a princess wouldn't have made any difference. They could take more, but they were hit harder. Twilight herself couldn't even stand near the border of the safe zone without getting nauseous, and sure as Tartarus that mare would try to go in there herself. She was stubborn like that. That just wouldn't do.
The sound of falling rubble up ahead snapped her attention away from her thoughts. As she carefully kept treading towards her destination, she was reminded of why exactly she liked to get lost in her own thoughts when walking around there. The base of her horn hurt. A lot. Like a piece of red-hot iron jammed in her skull, sending bolts of lightning into her head. Somewhere halfway between a broken bone healing and a tooth growing, only worse than both.
It wasn't even the only part of her body in pain. Just about every bone she knew of started to protest if she moved wrong, and she'd even discovered a couple new ones that way. Her muscles, particularly those on her torso, seemed equally unhappy about her situation, and sometimes made her feel like she'd just completed a full set of exercises.
And then was the matter of her hind legs. That, admittedly, she was legitimately scared about. The hooves could still feel, and the legs a little too going up from there. But everything between her tail and the end of her thighs was dull numbness, and she could just hope it wouldn't give out.
Still, it hadn't so far. Spending more time soaking in radiation wouldn't help matters at all, but she was there at that point, no use going back until she'd found everything she was there for. Thank goodness, the explosion had at least pushed everything away from the centre, so there was no need for her to walk right up to the fissure itself.
Stumbling just a bit down a slope of rubble, she reached another set of broken white walls and tiles and torn chunks of table, housing yet more of Twilight's and her team's research notes and results. She carefully took hold of them in her hooves and slipped them into her saddlebags. Maybe it wasn't so much of a problem that she couldn't use telekinesis. Between the radiation and how much what was there of her horn hurt, magic might have been out of the question either way in there.